Category Archives: Placement Year

I completed the kickstarter video and I am quite proud of myself for doing so because initially I hated doing the lip sync animation. I don’t know how some people do it, because only having 1 minute and 12 seconds was a lot. However, once I actually watched it back I was really satisfied with the outcome, and look forward to trying it again in the future.

I watched a really straightforward tutorial for how to create the lip sync. Initially I was going to attempt to use shapes and morph the mouth using different keyframes but this proved both problematic for creating the mouth shapes that had teeth and it didn’t look right.

So watching the tutorial you simply create the layers of different phonemes in illustrator, bring them into after effects and make each layer one key frame. Each keyframe pays after the other and then you just cut the comp down to the correct time.

Once you add the slider, expression and control (watch the video for how) you simply slide the slider until you get the appropriate phoneme and key it.

However, I noticed (prior to receiving Danny’s proper character versions)that I had forgotten to make the layer 3D so there was no shadow from them and also they don’t blink. Another issue is, I designed the characters in photoshop and thought I turned off the white background layer but apparently hadn’t, leading me to key out the white background and subsequently removing the whites of their eyes. Whoops.

I rectified these mistakes in the final version, although just before I hit render I thought I had gone deaf. It turned out at some point when editing the video I deleted the narration so I had to bring it back in and edited it again and try and match it up with the lip sync. Nothing is ever straightforward with me. Anyway… Here’s the kick-starter:

Danny did the concept art for this, (which you can see in the background and the tow main characters at the front).

Okay… This took a while. It wouldn’t have been complete except for Jennie helping me. When I last met in person with Danny we had discussed the poster being similar to Christopher Nolan’s film posters because I felt they were simple yet really effective at capturing the tone of the film.

Example of the posters

As you can see, they are fairly straightforward. A silhouette in the foreground and a dramatic scene in the background.

I took it upon myself to design the poster, and created this initially after a few hours.

I then sent it to Jennie for feedback, since she is far better at me at painting, and she said:

Add green light onto the characters

Have more detail

Make sure the characters fit with Danny’s style (they didn’t as you can see from the concept art in the powerpoints)

Add shadow on to the back of the stones too

The hill looks like a small bump

Jennie very graciously offered to help me and I sent her a version after that were I had added some trees to try and make the scene more interesting and add a sense of scale. Mainly thinking that all that needed fixed was the characters hair.

Feedback:

^^This was Jennie’s quick version to help illustrate her advice. The clouds were much better than my attempt (using difference clouds) and i could see there was a difference in scale. I also liked how she blended the grass on the hill.

She painted the clouds swirling around the light beam (which was my poorly executed intention)

This version features the font I designed called “BluQ” after the name of Danny’s business. The white lines on the poster are there to help me remember where the two character’s eye lines should be. I tried to make their poses more dynamic with Ari reaching for his sword and Ryne reaching out to him in fear.

By this point Jennie was actively collaborating with me on making the comic and I had shown Danny some of the earlier versions and he was pretty excited about it. I sent this version to Jennie and she came up with this quick doodle that I thought was more atmospheric than my 3 hour construction. This was to get the shape down right before she added in the two characters.

After all this, Jennie obviously had to focus on her own work, so I used her design to create the final poster (see below). Without Jennie’s help I definitely would not have been able to get to this standard of poster. I would have handed in the first one, but I am pleased with what the outcome is. Chatting about it afterwards it seems that the turning point was with the character design, as the curved shapes (which Mike talked about in Life Drawing) really took away to stiffness on the characters and made the poster a more dynamic piece of work. (Also pleased to say I did the hair myself).

I’ve been learning quite a bit about after effects the past few months and when Danny and I discussed creating the logo for, the then, Faolen Studios it came in handy.

Danny liked the idea of a jumping wolf design and so I created this.

I firstly drew the shape of the wolf jumping in Illustrator then went into after effects. I made a black background, added a layer with triangular particles flying out and then brought in the wolf as a new layer and changed the alpha settings.

Then when I was satisfied with how the particles looked in the wolf and that there were no gaps, I rendered out a frame as a .jpeg.

However, after thinking about it, Danny thought it was too detailed so I bumped up the particle size and got this.

Now Danny has created this logo, (not the finished version). Also trying to think of a new name for the company at the minute it is now Blu Q Studios.

I have to say, I learnt more sitting with James, Aidan, Beth, Rachel and Daryl than I did in the three months spent at TEX.

Getting to grips with Substance Painter was fairly easy with James and Rachel taking the time to walk me through what they needed, and it was great to see the team getting rewarded for their efforts on Friday.

It was really an honour to work with them, and to finally see the finished product was amazing. The film honestly looks stunning, and I hadn’t seen the other VR project they’d done about PTSD but it just made me really excited for final year if that is the quality of work we can produce.

I think the asset I’m most proud of making is the Pillar Drill because amazingly it has less faces that my lamp despite being a lot more complex and I think it just highlights how much my modelling efficiency has improved by getting to work and learn alongside Team Default.

I watched a few kickstart videos but I have to say it seems to be an oddity for webcomics and there weren’t that many examples that I could find. That being said maybe I just wasn’t looking in the right place.